Samson's riddle

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Hebrew. (October 2016) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Hebrew Wikipedia article at [[:he:חידת שמשון]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|he|חידת שמשון}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Samson's riddle is found in the biblical Book of Judges, where it is incorporated into a larger narrative about Samson, the last of the judges of the ancient Israelites. The riddle, with which Samson challenges his thirty wedding guests, is as follows: "Out of the eater came something to eat, and out of the strong came something sweet."

The solution is apparently impossible to discern through deduction alone, since it is based on a private experience of Samson's, who had previously killed a young male lion and found honeybees and honey in its corpse. However, the wedding guests extort the answer from Samson's wife; having lost the wager, Samson is required to give his guests thirty good suits, which he acquires by killing thirty men.

Modern commentators have suggested other possible solutions to the riddle. Aspects of the surrounding narrative have also been interpreted in various ways, with parallels being drawn to Greek myths of lion-killing heroes, and to the ancient belief that living creatures could spontaneously emerge from dead flesh.